


Five Months

by adiva_calandia



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-11
Updated: 2013-01-11
Packaged: 2017-11-25 02:24:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/634110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adiva_calandia/pseuds/adiva_calandia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Yeah. I’ve been here a long time. And not alone, either. People just keep showing up. Children, like us. Batches of three or four at a time."</p>
<p>Five months in Cold Oak.</p>
<p>Ava-centric. Violent and dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Months

**Author's Note:**

> "Yeah. I’ve been here a long time. And not alone, either. People just keep showing up. Children, like us. Batches of three or four at a time."
> 
> Specific warnings for, you know, serial murder? And Azazel being a creepy fucker.

"Go home, Ava. You'll be safe there," Sam says, smiling a little like some kind of big brother taking care of a wacky little sister. He opens the door to her car, and she obediently gets in, pulling out her keys.

"Well just--" She turns to look up at him. "Promise me you'll call, then. I mean when you get your brother, just to let me know that everything's all right." Her tone is as serious as she can make it, because she wants to get that exasperated older brother look out of his eyes, wants him to take her seriously on this.

He presses his lips together. "I promise."

"Thanks." She looks down, starts the car, starts to roll up the window. "Um! It was, uh, nice to meet you. Even with all the, you know, shooting and stealing and screaming." Beat. "That -- happens a lot around you, doesn't it?

He huffs a laugh. "It was nice to meet you too, Ava."

She rolls her eyes. "Way to avoid the question, Sam. Well." A little wave. "'Bye."

He waves back. She puts the car in drive and starts forward.

When she looks in the rearview mirror, he's already striding away.

* * *

_People like us_ , Ava thinks as she drives home.  _Psychics. Guys who can electrocute people. That's crazy._

_. . . I'm a_ psychic.

She laughs, but it's desperate.

What is she going to tell Brady?

* * *

She doesn't tell him anything, in the end. When he yells that she ran off without telling him anything, that he was frantic, she yells back that he’s her fiance, not her keeper, and they fight their way into bed where they make up with all the passion of lingering fear.

Afterwards, they fall asleep.

_\--darkdizzysmokescreamingBradyscreamingBrady’seyescoldeyesyellow—_

Ava wakes up from the nightmare, gasping for breath.

For a second, staring at the black-coated man standing by her bedside, she thinks she must still be asleep.

“Av . . .?”

The black-coated man moves faster than thought, one hand slashing out across Brady’s throat. A line of red appears, like a thread, a ribbon, a river. Brady makes a gurgling noise that can’t quite become a scream and grabs for the other man, who negligently slams him back onto the bed. A gout of blood splashes up onto Ava’s face.

And that’s when she starts to scream, as she looks from Brady’s cold, dead eyes, into the yellow-webbed ones of the black-coated man, as the nightmare comes true. They always come true.

The man with the yellow eyes smiles at her, indulgent. “Hi there, sweetheart.” He reaches for her, and she scrambles back against the headboard. He  _tsk_ s. “Oh, Ava, sugar, try to relax.”

A red-spattered hand comes to rest on her forehead. Her screams cut off.

“I can’t wait to see what you’re made of,” he says.

Everything goes black, in the overwhelming smell of sulfur.

* * *

She wakes up on a cold, splintery wood floor, and promptly panics.

When the hysteria recedes a little, she gets up and heads to the window of the room. It’s the second floor of a house or building, in a town that looks utterly abandoned, ruined. It’s impossible to tell where this is, except that she’s damn sure that it’s not Peoria.

The sun is either rising or setting; after watching for a few minutes, she decides it’s setting. Which means soon it will be dark.

She keeps herself from bursting into sobs again, with an effort, and heads for the stairs on the other side of the room.

Out in the square in front of the building, she turns in a slow circle, hugging her arms around herself, holding herself together.

“Hey!”

She can’t help it – she shrieks and spins around. The woman on the other side of the square yelps in reaction. They stare at each other in open-mouthed silence for a second.

And then, as one, they go running for each other, laughing a little hysterically at finding another person,  _any_  person.

“I’m sorry,” the other woman says. She’s Hispanic, tall, plump, and she has just a touch of an accent. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just – where are we? Who are you?”

“I don’t know,” Ava says. “I just woke up over there – I’m Ava, who’re you?”

“I’m Lena. I woke up back there.” She points back towards the woods. “How did we get here?”

“I don’t know,” she repeats. “I don’t remember – there’s something, but it’s—“

_\--eyesblood—_

Ava winces, rubbing her forehead. “It’s fuzzy.”

“ _Hello?!_ ”

Both women jump and look in the direction of the voice. “ _Hey!_ ” it yells again. “ _Hello?!_ ”

“. . . I-I guess we should check that out,” Ava finally stammers. “He sounds scared.”

“ _I’m_  scared, too,” Lena says, but nods. “Let’s go.”

They find him in a building with a locked front door, and finally end up breaking a window to get him out. Ava lends him her jacket to climb over the broken glass. He’s skinny, gawky, and he says his name is Sun.

“Let’s get out of here,” he says, when they’ve all introduced themselves.

“No,” Lena says, firmly. “Who knows what’s out in those woods? Let’s see if we can find some shelter, maybe make a fire, and we’ll get out of here in the morning.”

Ava agrees instantly; Sun takes a little convincing, but finally agrees as well. They pick an abandoned school house and try to settle in for the night. And they talk.

Lena is from Texas, she says; Sun is from Florida. Both are twenty-three.

_Just like me and Sam_ , Ava thinks. She shivers. “Do either of you ever get . . . headaches?”

Sun gives her a disdainful look. “Who  _doesn’t_?”

Lena, though, eyes her narrowly. “Yeah. About a year ago, I started getting really bad headaches. Never had them before that.”

“Me too,” says Ava, and looks at Sun. “Me and a guy I know.”

“. . . Yeah,” he says, staring at them. “Me too.” 

“Why?” Lena asks.

_Look, Ava, I have visions too, all right? So we're connected._

“No reason,” Ava mutters. “I – it’s – nothing, never mind. It’s late. We should get some sleep.”

Sun shrugs and settles into a corner, and soon he’s breathing deeply. Lena stretches out on one of the benches and follows suit. Ava stays curled by the wall, unwilling to close her eyes. Someone should keep a watch, she tells herself.

But she nods.

“So why didn’t you tell them, Ava?”

Her head jerks up at the oily voice. On the bench in front of her is a man who wasn’t there a second ago, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, smiling genially. The collar of his black coat frames his face, with its cold yellow eyes.

_\--BradyhishandlashesoutbloodBrady--_

“ _Guys!_ ” Ava shrieks.

Lena and Sun don’t stir. The yellow-eyed man chuckles.

“Don’t waste your breath, sugar. They’re sleeping. So are you.”

Ava stares at him, breathing hard. ”I-I’m dreaming?”

“Give the little lady a big cigar,” he says, pleased. “I wanted to talk to you without any . . . interruptions.”

“Wh-wh-who are you?”

He spreads his arms, like a welcoming father, like a crucifix. “I’m the next stage of your life.” Standing, he offers her a hand. She flinches back. “C’mon, walk with me.”

After a moment, she climbs unsteadily to her feet, eyes on his outstretched hand all the while. When she’s standing, she looks up at his face.

He’s smirking.

“You might do better than I’m expecting,” he murmurs, and turns and heads for the door. Ava hesitates.

He stops, and looks over his shoulder. “Don’t you want to know what happens next?”

She follows him outside.

He tells her that she’s his.

He tells her that she has so much potential, that she can do so much more than see the future.

He tells her that he’s giving her a chance to change the world.

He tells her that only one of the three people sleeping in the schoolhouse is going to live until morning.

He tells her that if she plays her cards right, it’ll be her.

“What are you  _saying_?” she demands. “You can’t be suggesting that I – that I – you want me to be that Scott guy!”

“I want you to be  _more_  than Scott Carey,” he cuts in. “More than Elena Aquila or Sun Bradford in there. More than Sam Winchester.”

“No. No no no.” She presses her hands over her ears. “I’m not listening to you. I’m not gonna be some crazy killer for you.”

“Are you going to survive?” he asks, and cocks his head. “Maybe you should wake up now, Ava honey. No wait—” He holds up a hand. “You’ve got another call on the line, I think.”

_\--clawsbloodseepingintothefloorboardslaughing--_

She jerks awake, and just like before, she’s staring into a stranger’s face. It’s a little girl, deathly pale.

And as Ava’s eyes meet hers, her face distorts horribly, flickers, and she raises hands like claws.

Ava screams. “ _No! Not me! NOT ME!_ ”

Suddenly her head feels like it’s about to split open, and she doubles over, crying out. Without knowing quite what she’s doing, she _pushes_  at the pain, at the cloudy presence outside it--

And then Lena is screaming, high-pitched and hoarse, as the little girl’s claws tear at her chest. Blood sprays and soaks into the floorboards.

Once Lena’s breath has stopped, the little girl dissolves into black smoke and vanishes through the crack under the door. Ava finally becomes aware that Sun has disappeared -- she’s alone in the room with Lena’s corpse.

Lena’s corpse.

All she can think is  _At least it wasn’t me._

* * *

When she leaves the schoolhouse the next morning, Sun is standing outside waiting for her. He has a plank over his shoulder.

“You killed Lena.”

“Wh-what? That – that  _thing_  killed her!”

“You set it on her! I saw you!”

“I didn’t! It was going to kill me! I don’t know what happened!”

“You killed her. The yellow-eyed man, he told you to kill her, didn’t he? Kill both of us.”

“—What?”

“Because he told me the same thing, and I thought none of us could do something like that, but I guess I was wrong.”

“Sun!”

“And if I don’t get rid of you, I’ll never get out of here alive myself, will I?”

“ _Sun!_ ”

She dodges the plank and knocks him over; he hardly weighs any more than her, and she manages, to her surprise, to get on top of him. He throws a punch that glances off her cheekbone. She returns the punch, more solidly, then gets off him and runs.

Later, she watches him from a second-story window, as he prowls the square. At some point, he picks up another plank and frowns at it.

It bursts into flame.

Ava curls up in a corner and muffles her sobs in her knees, because that cloudy presence is still just on the edge of her consciousness, and she doesn’t know what to do.

The next day, Sun sees her through a window and strides to the door of the building. A few minutes later, she smells smoke. Running out of the room, she sees the stairs starting to burn. Sun is standing at the bottom of them. He looks surprised to see her, in spite of himself.

“Don’t do this!” she yells. His jaw sets.

And that’s when the headache comes back. She can’t help it – she  _pushes_ \--

And opens her eyes to Sun screaming as the little girl tears into his chest.

* * *

The yellow-eyed man comes back a few days later when she’s curled up on the porch of one of the abandoned houses. He gives her a doubtful look.

She looks up at him, and then buries her face in her knees and doesn’t look up for a long time.

When she does, the yellow-eyed man is gone. But there is, incongruously, a brown paper bag sitting in front of her. There’s a sandwich inside, and an apple, and a carton of milk. A kid’s lunch. A student’s lunch.

* * *

She finds chalk in the schoolhouse and scrawls  _I WILL NOT KILL_  on the chalkboard, a reminder to her and to the yellow-eyed man.

* * *

If she squints at wood the right way, she finds, she can make it smolder. Working at it every day, she finally produces a small flame.

It’s something to do.

* * *

The next group is two men and a woman. None of them remember how they got there. She tells them that she’s been there for two weeks; they ask her what’s going on.

They don’t believe her.

The other woman, Kary, kills one of the men the next morning with just a touch. Ava hides, and watches Kary and the other man stalk each other. When they both go into the half-burned house, she sets it on fire, and goes back to the schoolhouse. The headache is so bad that she thinks it will kill her. She hopes so.

When the yellow-eyed man comes back the next time, he grins at her approvingly.

* * *

It gets easier after that. She no longer tries to explain what’s going on; once or twice, someone had believed her, and tried to kill her first. It gives them an advantage she can’t afford.

She kills from a distance, by sending the little girl after the others, once by collapsing a beam onto a man.

The scrawled  _I WILL NOT KILL_  mocks her, and she erases it. The little girl seems fond of the phrase, though, because every time she kills for Ava, it reappears on the chalkboard. 

It starts to be a challenge. How quickly can she get them before they try to get her? What can she make the little girl do? What other powers can she learn from the others?

The groups arrive, two or three or four new people, every few weeks, and she gets very good at convincing them that she’s as clueless as they are. It’s another part of the game.

* * *

Another group arrives one day, and she sneaks into one of the houses through the unlocked back door, then pounds on the locked front door, yelling for help.

Sam Winchester opens it.

This, she thinks, as she gasps out his name, will be quite the challenge.

She’s looking forward to it.

* * *

She never hears Jake come up behind her.

* * *

“I was really starting to root for you, there,” the yellow-eyed man tells her, shaking his head. “Oh, well.” A sigh. “We all must learn to live with disappointment.”

He smiles pleasantly.

“Enjoy your stay.”

 


End file.
